Latest update May 14th, 2026 12:35 AM
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Reconciliation
Last Thursday, the National Assembly debated and then voted unanimously on a motion that had been placed before it. In these contentious political times, this act in itself would be cause for comment; but the fact that the motion concerned the first Executive President of Guyana, Mr Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham, makes it even more so.
Substantively, the motion called on the Assembly to acknowledge Mr Burnham’s “extraordinary and outstanding career as a Guyanese leader” and to prepare and publish a collection of his speeches.
It also called on the State to collect all the works of each President of Guyana, and to commission and display their portraits in the National Assembly.
While in most countries such a motion may not even be necessary, it is indicia of our deeply divided political culture that it is only twenty-three years after Mr Burnham’s death that a call for an evaluation of his political role could even be floated.
Whatever else may be said of him, Mr Burnham was certainly controversial; but it is very often forgotten that much of what generated that controversy found favour with the other major political party in the country – the PPP.
In that sense, if we are to consider the political representatives in Parliament as ‘representing” the people of Guyana, then those actions ought not to be considered ‘controversial” at all.
Let us take Mr. Burnham’s decision to nationalise first the bauxite industry, and then sugar and the rest of the “commanding heights of the economy”: decisions now widely considered fatal.
These actions were consistent with the socialist orientation of Mr Burnham which had been long announced, but few had taken him seriously. While there were many Guyanese – even some within the PNC — who may not have hewed to that ideology, this was certainly not true of Mr Burnham’s major political opponents. The nationalisations were not only supported by the PPP, but they were actually actively encouraged because of the latter’s communist ideology.
The PPP had declared itself to be a communist party in 1969, and the bauxite operations were nationalised in 1970. As a matter of fact, when the PNC, in its “Declaration of Sophia” in 1974, announced that it was socialist and would be seeking to construct a socialist society under the mechanism of “cooperative socialism”, the PPP scoffed that the PNC was a mere pretender.
We also know today that, in the months before his death, Mr Burnham had actively engaged the PPP in talks that focused on some sort of “Government of National Unity”. It is incumbent for players from both parties who had participated in those talks to be more forthcoming about the substantive aspects of what was on the table.
While there has been some information released into the public realm, some of the key participants can help us all by fleshing out the details. Guyana can only benefit.
The point we are seeking to develop at this time is that while we, as a people, tend to focus on our differences in almost all our interactions – especially in our political ones – we have far more commonalities that we sweep under the rug, to our national detriment. We therefore commend our politicians for rising to the occasion in acknowledging the large role that Mr Burnham played in the shaping of our modern history.
It is inevitable that we will differ on the details of anyone who was so much larger-than-life as was Mr Burnham, but the reason for digging up some of our history above was to demonstrate that we may have all been complicit in some of the events and policies for which we castigate Mr Burnham only.
Mr RHO Corbin pointed out that, in his address four years ago when he was elected leader of the PNC, he declared, “If Guyana is to move forward, there must be a paradigm shift. We cannot continue in this vicious cycle. For cohesion to be achieved, we have to close the chapter of the past”.
We hope that in this climate, where there is so much talk of the PPP also choosing a leader to lead them into the next elections, that the unanimous passing of the motion on Mr Burnham signals a shift in orientation towards the much-needed reconciliation that a wounded Guyana demands.
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